Toxic Relationships and One-Dimensional Women: Why CoHo Books Are a Joke

Zafnah Unaisah ’26

Every time I pick up a Colleen Hoover book, I feel like I’m reading a 13-year-old’s Wattpad brainchild. Though I tried to be open-minded, thinking maybe I’d enjoy at least one of her books (which, spoiler alert, I didn’t), they were all poorly written and insubstantial. Sometimes, I got so frustrated that I had to put my book down, staring at the wall for a few minutes and wondering why I was even trying. I wholeheartedly believe that everyone is entitled to their own literary preferences, but I can’t wrap my mind around how someone can find pleasure in reading novels that follow characters trapped in toxic relationships that are romanticized to the point of nausea.

This is just scratching the surface of my thoughts, but there are many aspects of Colleen Hoover’s writing that make it displeasing to read. The author uses the “pregnancy trope” to create unnecessary tension in most of her novels, refusing to relinquish the cliche. In Hoover’s 2016 It Ends With Us–a novel that does well in exploring the difficult theme of domestic abuse–Lily’s pregnancy felt like a lazy plot device. There was little build up to her baby, who was abruptly mentioned at the end of the book, leaving Hoover with limited time to flush out the ramifications. Lily’s daughter, Emerson, is placed in the narrative to symbolize breaking the cycle of abuse. At the end of the novel, Lily leaves Ryle, her husband, to ensure that Emerson doesn’t have to suffer as she did. Hoover’s message would have been significantly more empowering if Lily had broken free on her own terms, recognizing that she, and not just her child, deserves more. Why did the cycle end only after her pregnancy? If she hadn’t been pregnant, would she have left? The story depends on the pregnancy as Lily’s tipping point, and I wonder if she could have found the strength to walk away under different circumstances. Though the tired pregnancy arc is the most bothersome in It Ends With Us, it is also frustratingly present in her other novels Ugly Love and Verity. For those books, however, there are other aspects that take the cake.

For one, there’s this common thread in her books where the women either act as typical damsels in distress, or have no self-respect. Each time they’re “saved,” it’s by an emotionally unavailable knight in shining armor with a dark, mysterious past, from whose irresistible pull they can never break free. In Verity, the main character Lowen falls in love with Jeremy Crawford, a man with a traumatic past. Despite knowing that his wife, Verity, is paralyzed and supposedly insane, and that he has lost his two children, Lowen meddles in his already broken life. Rather than giving Jeremy the space he needs to heal and fix his relationship with Verity, she inserts herself into the picture. In some ways, Lowen is Jeremy’s savior, as she rescues him from the shadow of Verity’s presence and the weight of his unresolved grief. This, however, adds to the problematic aspects of the book because Lowen’s self-worth ends up coming solely from “fixing” Jeremy’s brokenness. And well, Verity’s character also embodies a negative relationship with Jeremy, whom she is entirely dependent on. Her thoughts, actions, and very identity all revolve around her husband, leaving her character quite one-dimensional.

Ugly Love follows a similar, equally problematic pattern, and also happens to be the novel I despise the most. The male lead, Miles, is a pilot who lost his son in a car accident, leading him to split with his then-girlfriend, Rachel. Yet again, Hoover presents her reader with a man, fraught with unresolved trauma, who is glaringly emotionally unavailable. His love interest, Tate, is defined by her painfully obvious (you guessed it!) lack of self-respect. Their relationship begins casually–they are friends with benefits–but soon enough Tate falls in love. It was frustrating to read how persistent Tate was in sticking with Miles, even after he demonstrated he hadn’t moved on by calling her Rachel in an intimate moment. Though she is only a stand-in for the woman he truly loved, Tate remains with him. It’s quite clear that Miles loved Rachel more than he will ever love Tate, but her lack of self-respect leaves her perfectly content with that.

Hoover’s portrayal of women is undeniably harmful. Her feebly developed characters are defined exclusively by their relationships with men, and they refuse to prioritize themselves in the face of toxic dynamics. Her characters often lack the agency and self-respect to walk away, but, come the end of each novel, she rushes them to a happily ever after. Hoover’s mode of writing perpetuates the notion that women should endure pain and sacrifice their own well-being to mend a “broken” partner or try to make an impossible relationship work. The persistence in relying on this pattern not only glorifies toxic relationships but perpetuates harmful narratives about women’s roles in romantic relationships. Hoover creates her female characters in a way that hinders their growth and inhibits them from thriving independently. Through her tropes and her stereotypes, she saps them of their individuality.